Report Banding

Report Line Banding in Microsoft Access

Program report
banding in Visual Basic.
Do you remember way back when you had large reports with and green stripped fan-fold
computer paper? With today's printers you'll find it hard to get
banded paper for your desktop printer - who needs it anyway when you can create
the same report banding using a few lines of visual basic code within an Access
database. The banded report lines make it easier for your eyes to follow
across wide detail lines. Here's a way for you to reproduce this changing
line colors without having to buy the old fan-fold paper and you can
choose any color - pastels only please.

Generating detail report line banding in an Access report is fairly easy once you
see how to do it. After downloading the
Access Report Banding Example:

Press the Open Report button below and you'll see the report in print preview
mode
Note the color banding of the detail lines in the report.

Place the report in design view. Then pick 'View' menu and then 'Code' . You'll
see the visual basic code used the create the banding.

Note the iline variable at the top of the code - this is a global variable
(global to the report only). Iline is a boolean variable and therefore has two
values - either true or false.

Note the event procedure On format for the Detail section of the report.

If the iline variable is true then the detail section back color is set to light
blue. If the iline variable is false then the detail back color is set to white.

Note that the detail on format event procedure causes the iline variable to
toggle back and forth from true to false - thereby changing the line colors.